The Cost of Living Index tracks how prices rise as Corporations and business owners succumb, acquiesce or jump ahead of the pressures that motivate their need, or want, for more money. The Cost of Living Index is that measurement by which government keeps apace of their employees' salaried ability to maintain household, family and personal obligations.
Public Sector unions help keep the government's feet to the fire regarding fair pay. Private sector unions do the same though those unions have been systematically strangled, marginalized and neutralized by statute and judicial action since the Reagan era. Noteworthy is that the nation's average wages have stagnated and not kept pace with cost of living increases since the 1980s -- the Reagan era -- as well.
More plainly stated, corporations have raised their prices without raising their employees' salaries and wages proportionately. Productivity in the United States has increased from 200% to over 350%, dependent on the industry, since the Reagan era. So, corporations and business owners have collected the extra profit from raising their prices without paying their employees in proportion to those increases. Corporations and Businesses have reaped the benefits of improved productivity without their employees' wages and salaries reflecting those increased gains.
The overwhelming majority of contemporary wage earners, especially since the so-called Great Recession, have only one protection regarding the wages they earn: Minimum Wage statutes. The minimum wage no longer reflects the pressures and requirements of a living wage. It hasn't since the Reagan era. A living wage is one which is enough to provide for the needs of an average, two adult, two child, nuclear family. How long has *that* not been the norm?
Time was a family could buy a house, own one or two cars, take a vacation every year or so, and send the kids to collage without going into staggering debt. Even after all that, the family could still save for retirement. That hasn't been the norm since the Reagan era. Not since trickle down economics. Since rampant deregulation. Since systematic "conservative" government warfare on unions. Since Reagan's admonition that government isn't the solution, government is the problem. Since socialism became confused with Communism. Since New Gingrich labelled the term liberal a dirty word. Since corporations and rich people got so many tax cuts that the lie describing the social safety net as not affordable became a self fulfilling prophesy. That led to social programs being undermined with funding cuts as some kind of evil, and undeserved by every American citizen who isn't rich enough to not need them. As if the electorate never chose FDR for his policies or his Presidency never happened.
Had the minimum wage, alone, tracked the cost of living, it would be over $24 per hour today. Similarly, had corporate wages and salaries tracked cost of living increases as corporate charges for goods and services has, people who work in corporate offices or in many of the more highly profitable small to medium businesses, would enjoy take home pay up to three and one-half times more than what their bosses currently claim is fair and competitive.
They're lying to you. They're the same ones who say government is the problem, that liberal is a bad word, that unions are bad, and public protections and the safety net is a 'way too expensive socialist evil while giving ridiculously high and undeserved tax cuts to the minuscule upper most elite who already have more than they could possibly spend in many multiple life times. They'll continue lying to pad their pockets as long as the American public lets them get away with it.
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